Mobile telecommunication devices or telephony endpoints utilizing wireless communication protocols are ubiquitous. Many of these devices utilize one of the competing circuit-switched or Internet Protocol (IP) cellular networks (e.g., GSM or CDMA) to place and receive telephone calls to other telephony endpoint devices. Typically, a telephony endpoint device may communicate with one or more other mobile telephony devices on the same or another circuit-switched or IP cellular network, a Voice-over-IP (VoIP) telephony device operable over an IP network such as the Internet, and/or a plain old telephone service (POTS) telephony device operable over the public switched telephone network (PSTN). Each of these telephony endpoint devices may use a different access network but may all be interfaced at some point to allow for communication among the different networks.
There has been a significant and ongoing migration away from circuit-switched legacy wireline telephony to a reliance on mobile wireless telephony service. This so called “cord-cutting” has led to a shift in the manner telephony services are consumed. For instance, the concept of multiple telephones sharing the same telephone number when connected to the same circuit-switched endpoint does not have an analog in the mobile wireless service model. Thus, two or more people on one end of a telephone call cannot easily participate in the telephone call with the party(s) on the other end because there are no ‘extension’ phones connected to the same line.
What is needed is a technique to easily allow the intended recipient of a telephone call to bridge other secondary telephony endpoints into the call.